Bitter Sun

by Beth Lewis

  He shifted, his sneakers scraped the concrete floor.

  ‘Rudy?’ I said.

  He shook, head to toe, then stared back up at me, stalled halfway down the stairs. His eyes gleamed bright beneath the naked bulb.

  ‘Holy shit, John,’ he whispered. The movie star turned terrified boy, eyes white and wet. ‘Holy shit.’

  ‘What is it?’ I said, the wooden boards creaking beneath me.

  ‘I don’t … We were right, John …’ his voice trembled, his eyes wild. My mind went to all the cop shows and spy comics and horror movies we’d watched and soaked up, all the terrible awful things in full Technicolor. Anyone could be down there in that basement, a wife, a child, a woman or man nobody knew was missing, they could be chained and gagged, weeping for a saviour.

  My heart thundered. The rain grew to a storm. Rudy backed into the wall, shaking his head. ‘Jesus, I don’t believe it, fuck.’

  Don’t do it, John, the other me said. Turn around, leave, find the truth somewhere else.

  But now I have to know. What if I’m wrong about Frank?

  There is still time. Turn around. What if you’re right?

  I reached the bottom step.

  Something moved, snapped free of the wall, grabbed my shoulders.

  My heart exploded. No more breath, all white fire and fear. I screamed, fell, scrambled away. Hot blood filled my ears but I could hear only one thing. One thing that tore a strip of skin from my chest.

  Rudy laughing.

  He’d grabbed me. He’d scared me. He’d done it on purpose. The bastard. The fucking bastard. I could kill you, I could kill you right now. Hands around your throat until you stop fucking laughing.

  ‘It’s just a basement,’ he said, doubling over, slapping his thigh. ‘Full of junk, just like you said.’

  At the top of the stairs, the girls sighed.

  ‘Rudy, for Christ’s sake,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Your face, man,’ Rudy still laughing, ha-fucking-ha. ‘If I could bottle that face and sell it for laughs, I’d be a millionaire.’

  ‘You’re an asshole,’ I said, struggled to my feet. Adrenalin ebbed and made my muscles shaky and weak.

  Rudy held out his hand to help me up but I slapped it away.

  ‘That was a really shitty thing to do,’ I said.

  I felt tears welling inside my cheeks, the tell-tale pull of my chin and ache in my jaw. I wouldn’t cry, not in front of him, not after all this.

  I stood and turned away from the still-grinning Rudy.

  ‘Aw, come on, John, it was just a joke, you’re wound so tight.’

  ‘It wasn’t funny.’

  The basement was just a basement. No torture chamber. No cages. No guns. No blood. The storm inside my chest calmed and I could see the room clearly. In one corner, piles of papier-mâché animals from the church’s nativity float, a few boxes labelled ‘Books’, a few pieces of broken furniture. On one wall, a rack of household tools, same ones Eric had in our woodshed, and a heavy wooden worktable with boxes underneath. At the top, a single narrow window looked out across the back yard.

  To the left, almost behind the stairs, something caught my eye.

  A bed beside the wall. One of those foldable ones with a metal frame.

  ‘Look,’ Rudy nodded, saw it too.

  ‘You think he sleeps down here?’ I asked. Forced Rudy’s cruel joke to the back of my mind.

  ‘No,’ Rudy said. ‘His bedroom was all messed up and all his clothes were there. Even half a glass of water.’

  The bed was neatly made with a plain white blanket and thin pillow. The pillow had a dip in the centre as if it were slept on regularly.

  ‘This is weird,’ Rudy whispered behind me. ‘Why would you keep a made bed in your basement?’

  My head raced for an explanation, like the school librarian flicking through the card catalogue. Maybe the bed is for guests. Maybe when he’s working he gets tired, takes a nap. Maybe.

  The house was quiet but for the occasional footstep or murmur from Gloria or Jenny upstairs. I glanced around; something about the location of the bed confused me. I looked from the bed, around the room, floor to ceiling.

  And then I realised. ‘The window. You can’t see the window from the bed.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘It’s the only place in the basement where you can’t see outside.’

  Rudy let out an ‘oooh’ and said, ‘Which means nobody can see inside either. The dirty bastard can do whatever he wants down here and nobody can see a dickie bird.’

  I shook my head. ‘What’s he going to be doing, Rudy?’

  My friend balled his fists and rocked his hips back and forth, humped the air. ‘Anything the old perv wants.’

  Then he laughed, saw the disgust on my face. ‘See what I mean, Johnny? You’re wound so tight.’

  ‘Take a hike, Rudy. The pastor doesn’t do that.’

  Rudy threw up his hands. ‘Whatever you say, Saint John-o.’

  The bed turned sinister before my eyes. But it was Rudy’s words. It was the smoke in the sky. It was the explosion, Mary’s body, the meeting between Frank and Bung-Eye and the gruff man. It was all rumour. Thin white bones with no meat. No clue as to the animal they came from. I shoved any doubt down inside that dark part of me, the part where I shoved Momma’s drunken fights, Jenny’s tears, where I put the snide shouts of freak and killer and the thrown stones. That part would keep the doubt hidden. Keep it where it belonged.

  I left Rudy by the bed. I didn’t want to look at it.

  I breathed in the smell of the basement, Frank’s own den. I took in the rest of it, the piles of old moving boxes stacked by a wall, a dust sheet covering a large piece of furniture, splashes of green and red paint on the floor by the edge of the sheet like two cans had been knocked and splattered.

  Green paint. My throat tightened. They’d found green paint on Mary Ridley’s body.

  Need more evidence than that, Johnny boy?

  Yes. Did they find red paint on Mary Ridley’s body? No, they didn’t, so shut the hell up. Forget you ever saw it. With my foot, I slid the dust sheet over the paint.

  On the far wall, beneath the strip of window, was the worktable. Craft supplies to match the papier-mâché animals, paint cans, jars of junk metal, full of washers, pennies, keys. A few boxes of car parts underneath. Normal stuff. Stuff we had in our barn, stuff Eric and a dozen past Pigeon Pas would tinker with. I ran my hand over the worktable. Frank sat here to make models or clean oil filters. Imagined sitting here with him, listening, learning.

  A scraping noise made me turn. Rudy dragged a box from beneath the bed. He pulled out a light purple cardigan and my chest turned to stone.

  Icy worms writhed in my gut. Same one as in the Polaroid? Don’t be stupid. How many purple cardigans are there in the world? Thousands. Millions. Hell, Momma probably had something just like it. Wouldn’t think she was involved in a murder just because of that, would you? Judge and jury’d laugh you right out of the courthouse.

  ‘We should go,’ I said. Rudy hadn’t seen the Polaroid but he might want to look around the rest of the house. He might find it. He might search more of the basement and see the paint and then he’d put two and two together and get a hundred.

  ‘Now,’ I said, couldn’t keep the shakes out of my voice. ‘Let’s go.’

  Rudy dropped the cardigan back in the box. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  I had to get out. We had to get out.

  ‘I just … I can’t breathe down here.’ I paced, flapped my hands, felt my face heat and turn red. ‘I need air. I need air.’

  Just go. Run. Now.

  Rudy was back up the stairs just a second behind me. We burst into the kitchen as if we’d run a race, panting, bent over and leaning on our knees. He closed the door as Jenny and Gloria appeared from the living room.

  Out of the house, John Royal, get out of the house.

  I was past Gloria, to the back door, through the screen and into the ya
rd. Fresh air, oh Lord, give me fresh air. I sucked it in but tasted smoke. Why was there smoke? I couldn’t think. Why was it so dark? Then I remembered. My body turned to lead and I couldn’t even lift my arm to wipe the sweat from my face.

  I felt the others crowd around me. Jenny put her hand on my back. ‘Johnny, what was down there?’

  But I just shook my head, couldn’t speak. I stood silent in the pastor’s back yard, staring at the basement window, while Rudy told them.

  ‘There’s a bed down there. In the basement. And you can’t see it from the window. That’s fucked up, huh? The pastor has to be elbow deep in all this with a set-up like that. Bet you a thousand bucks he killed Mary Ridley down there.’

  Hearing him talk like that pushed needles into my ears. Every word sharp but I didn’t have the energy to bat them away. Rudy was wrong. Gloria was wrong. Jenny was wrong. I swallowed back bile.

  ‘The bed frame was all scratched up in weird places too,’ Rudy said. ‘Deep scratches, you know, like metal on metal. Some on the wall too. And get this,’ he made us lean in, ‘the whole bed was bolted to the floor.’

  Wings beat in my gut, grew into a storm.

  ‘Bolted?’ I said.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Rudy nodded. ‘Messed. Up.’

  Why would anyone bolt down a bed? By the look on their faces we all asked ourselves the same question but none of us came up with an answer. Gloria told them about the Polaroid, the blurred girl who could be Mary Ridley or could be anyone else. She didn’t mention the purple cardigan and I didn’t either. Rudy knowing it was in the photo would be the last nail for Frank’s coffin. I kept my mouth shut about the paint too. That was all we’d found, a neat bed and a photograph. The rest I’d put in that dark pit and there it would stay. Frank was a friend and I wouldn’t have his name, his standing, his goodness, questioned any more.

  Something inside me laughed. Something inside me stood up, cleared its throat and said, you don’t really believe all that, do you, Johnny boy?

  The sky darkened further, the sun sinking behind the black smoke. The quiet was a heavy blanket on us, like the tent pole collapsed, leaving us sprawling blind beneath canvas. Rudy re-locked Frank’s door. From the outside, the house was as it had been, so simple and plain, like every other on the street. Nothing special, nothing evil. But inside those walls, inside my head, something stirred. Sinister memories etched into the metal bed frame and faint scratches on the wall, all invisible from the outside as if by the devil’s design.

  ‘What now?’ Jenny said.

  Gloria looked at each of us. ‘After the fires have been put out and everyone has calmed down, we go to Samuels.’

  ‘How long is that going to take?’ Jenny asked.

  Gloria narrowed her eyes. ‘We’ll give him two days, then we make him listen.’

  The four of us parted ways at the end of the pastor’s street. Gloria and Rudy went north, me and Jenny west. It was close to six p.m., the rain had stopped but the sky was still heavy with smoke. Any other day, it could have been just a regular storm, clouds instead of smoke, the darkening before the thunder crash, but it hung up there like some otherworldly fog that wouldn’t disperse. Walking beneath it, I felt its weight pressing on my back, pushing me into the sidewalk, into the dirt tracks, deep down into the earth itself.

  Jenny and me crossed into the fields at the edge of town, we cut northwest toward home, which took us through the Hackett farm. At the top of the Island, the view, the vastness of it, stopped us both.

  ‘My God,’ Jenny murmured.

  The Easton mill was a piece of Larson so key and constant that your eye glossed over it. Always just there, the multi-level sheds, the top of the grain elevator, the twin silos by the road, the two dozen more out of view. Part of the landscape, white with snow in winter, grey with age in summer.

  Not any more.

  The Easton mill blazed and a black skeleton grew out of the smoke. A battalion of fire trucks shot useless jets of water. Cops and firemen only able to watch as the smoke streaked a fat funnel southeast for miles.

  ‘They’ll see that in St Louis. Maybe even further, down in Tennessee even,’ Jenny said. ‘I can’t believe it. I hope Eric isn’t hurt.’

  Eric’s fine, he has to be, we would know. We’d feel it, wouldn’t we? Course we would. Eric didn’t linger long in my mind; the pastor’s house, that bed, the paint, the cardigan, the scratches, those memories swarmed over my brain, infected every thought.

  Beneath the smoke sky, a flock of starlings launched, like the darkness itself had taken shape and started to dance. The devil was in the birds today, rejoicing at the destruction, weaving a gruesome ballet. A taunt to the town.

  Jenny took my hand. ‘It’s all going to change now, isn’t it? Everything will change.’

  ‘Pastor Jacobs?’

  ‘The mill. So many people work there, Eric, Maddie-May’s mom in the office, the Lyle brothers, Timmy Greer’s dad. Everyone,’ her hand went to her mouth. ‘God. They could all be dead. Eric could be dead. That explosion was terrible. Johnny, without the mill …’

  There was no need for her to finish the thought. Without the mill, there would be no more Larson.

  ‘They may as well have burned the whole town with it,’ I said.

  It would have been kinder, like shooting a sick dog before it had a chance to suffer. But people don’t think that way about themselves. They’ll strive and yearn and fight and they’ll lose. They’ll die anyway. Larson will die.

  A feeling, like a piece of lead, hit my chest and stayed there. It said to me things were bad but they were going to get a lot worse.

  We hurried home and found Momma sitting beside the blaring radio, rocking back and forth. When she saw us, she cried out, scooped us both up in her arms, squeezed us, breathed us in with a growl.

  ‘You’re safe, my babies, you’re safe.’

  Time seemed to have stopped while we were in Frank’s house. The frenzy over the mill had gone from me and Jenny hours ago but it still blazed in Momma and the spark caught us too. Suddenly Frank didn’t matter. His house didn’t matter. We hadn’t done it. It wasn’t real. Only the mill was real, the fire, the smoke, the panic, the shattered school windows and wide, terrified eyes.

  ‘Is Eric okay?’ Jenny said, muffled by Momma’s chest.

  ‘He’s fine, he’s fine,’ she kept saying. ‘He’s out there helping to put the fire out. Such a good man.’

  Momma pulled away from us but kept hold of our arms. ‘Where the hell have you been? School let out hours ago, I went to collect you. You weren’t there. You can’t just run off like that.’

  I caught Jenny’s eye, the tremor in it.

  ‘We walked home through Hackett’s,’ I said. I didn’t want to lie completely. ‘We wanted to watch from the hill.’

  Momma stroked my hair with a shaking hand. Her eyes were wet, bloodshot, but she didn’t smell of whiskey. She wasn’t drunk, all would be well. My shoulders relaxed.

  ‘Good. Good,’ she nodded and nodded, stroked and stroked.

  ‘What happened?’ Jenny asked.

  Momma’s attention snapped to her, I winced at the speed, waiting for the ferocity that usually came with it.

  But Momma smiled, gently rubbed her thumb on Jenny’s arm.

  ‘Nobody is really sure,’ Momma said. ‘But when I went to the school, that fat maid – Mandy something – said Roy Easton, Mark’s father, did it on purpose. Set fire to the whole thing.’

  ‘Is Mr Easton okay?’ Jenny said.

  ‘No, I don’t think so, baby. They say he was inside when the explosion went off.’ Momma tried to smile but it wouldn’t reach the corners.

  Momma got up, said something about dinner then disappeared into the kitchen. The radio came back into focus, the rolling news update said nothing to report over and over again in different ways. It said there was a fire, an explosion, suspicious circumstances, no further updates, then back to the top.

  I switched it off.

  I w
as numb. I didn’t know the right thing to say or do, the proper way to act during a crisis. Neither did Jenny. We stood straight and still in the family room, where Momma had hugged us. We were deflated balloons, fallen flat on the floor and unable to get up. We just lay there, waiting for the air to return.

  What do you do when the world crumbles?

  Frank, a man I trusted like a father, the leader of our community and the one person we would all need in this time of darkness, was under threat from my sister and my friends. The town, a flock of sheep lost in the field, would need their shepherd but he was fighting away wolves.

  My mind twisted around itself and I didn’t see anything in straight lines any more. There was something off about his house. The paint. The cardigan. The photograph. The bed. Put all together, it was hard to ignore. The pastor had secrets, he may have known Mary Ridley, done something to her. He may have even killed her, though the thought made me sick to my stomach. He probably did absolutely nothing and all those things we found were innocently explained but I didn’t know for sure. One-hundred-per-cent, stake-my-Jenny’s-life-on-it sure. I just didn’t know. Tell me what to do, God, put me on the right path. Momma would know, but Momma couldn’t know we’d gone snooping, it could wake a monster and Jenny would get the claws. My head ached and burned and the fire consumed my hair, my skin, cracked my skull.

  I rushed outside, ignoring Momma and Jenny’s questions, ran and ran to the back corner of the house. I flung away the lid of the rain barrel and dunked my head in the cold water. Sizzle, fizz, steam rose. The fire doused. I collapsed onto the dry grass, water streaming down my face, and searched the sky. Except for the streak of black smoke, it was empty, quiet, not even a bird. No answers for you John Royal, you’re on your own. I didn’t know what to do. Could I let my friends take away my sort-of father, the spiritual head of the town, even if that head was a serpent’s?

  I had two days to decide because once the fire and panic died down, Gloria, Rudy, Jenny and I were going to see Samuels. For, I hoped, the last time.

  I wondered though, staring at the sky, if catching Mary Ridley’s killer would even make a difference. Did it even matter in the long run? From that day, Larson changed to a place I barely recognised and it all came from Mark and Tracy, not Mary Ridley. Their stupid, selfish choice damned us all but it was my sister who suffered the worst.